I'll write a more full review later, but just to get a couple initial thoughts down. . .

[xiphias]

Lis and I just got back from seeing the premiere of Cardenio, by Stephen Greenblatt and Charles L. Mee, loosely based on what we know of the play by the same name by Shakespeare. Greenblatt is a well-known Shakespeare scholar, and so we were interested to see what they did with this.

I'll write more later, but I wanted to get a couple things down while I remembered them.

There are three questions to ask about a production like this:
1. Is it fun to watch?
2. Is it a good play?
3. Is it a good pastiche of Shakespeare?

The answers, in this case, are "yes", "meh", and "no".

One thing Lis said on the way home: "I was hoping to see something like Shakespeare's Cardenio, not an episode of Friends."

Although, to be fair, if this HAD been an episode of Friends, it would have been a two-hour season finale special, not just a regular episode.

As far as, "was it good Shakespeare fanfic"? Let's put it this way. On the drive home, Lis was shocked to realize that the play we'd seen observed the Aristotelian unities . . . .

(See, in the Middle Ages, the idea was that all plays should be set in a single location, that the action should take place over the course of no more than a day, and that there should be only one main action with few or no subplots. Shakespeare blew this concept to smithereens, writing plays that sprawled over continents and decades, with two or three intertwining but more-or-less independent subplots, so much so that he entirely re-wrote the rules of what drama could be. So Lis was genuinely disturbed to realize that the entire action we'd seen took place on one terrace, over the course of one day, with really only one main action.)

Comments

[yendi]

See, if the play were more affordable, I might have been willing to consider it. But AmRep prices are way too high for something that sounds this mediocre.